THE PILLOW BOOK

INTRODUCTION Sei Shōnagon is among the greatest writers of prose in the long history of Japanese literature; The Pillow Book is an exceedingly rich source of information concerning the halcyon period in which she lived. Yet about her own life we have almost no definite facts. She was born approximately a thousand years ago (965 is a likely date) and served as lady-in-waiting to Empress Sadako during the last decade of the tenth century. Her father, whether real or adoptive, was Motosuke, a member of the Kiyowara clan, who worked as a provincial official but was best known as a scholar and a poet. It is possible, though I think unlikely, that Shōnagon was briefly married to a government official called Tachibana no Norimitsu, by whom she may have had a son. Her life after her service ended is totally obscure. There is a tradition that she died in lonely poverty; but this may be the invention of moralists who, shocked by her worldly approach and promiscuous doings, ascribed to her last years a type of retribution that occurs more often in fiction than in reality.

Of Shōnagon’s relations with her family nothing is known, and she mentions her father only once; we have no idea where or how she lived when not at Court, nor when or where she died. Even her name is uncertain: in the palace she was called Shōnagon (“Minor Counsellor), but recent research suggests that her real name may have been Nagiko; Sei refers to the Kiyowara family.

There is an acidulous reference to Sei Shōnagon in the diary of her great contemporary, Murasaki Shikibu, the author of The Tale of Genji: Sei Shōnagon has the most extraordinary air of self-satisfaction. Yet, if we stop to examine those Chinese writings of hers that she, so presumptuously scatters about the place, we find that they are full of imperfections. Someone who makes such an effort to be different from others is bound to fall in people’s esteem, and I can only think that her future will be a hard one. She is a gifted woman, to be sure. Yet, if one gives free rein to one’s emotions even under the most in appropriate circumstances, if one has to sample each interesting thing that comes along, people are bound to regard one as frivolous. And how can things turn out well for such a woman?

This is almost our only information about Sei Shōnagon except what is revealed by The Pillow Book itself. A vast collec tion of personal notes, her book covers the ten-odd years during which she served at Court, and reveals a complicated, intelligent, well-informed woman who was quick, impatient, keenly obser vant of detail, high-spirited, witty, emulative, sensitive to the charms and beauties of the world and to the pathos of things, yet intolerant and callous about people whom she regarded as her social or intellectual inferiors.

Shōnagon wrote during the great mid-Heian period of feminine vernacular literature that produced not only the world’s first psychological novel, The Tale of Genji, but vast quantities of poetry and a series of diaries, mostly by Court ladies, which enable us to imagine what life was like for upper-class Japanese women a thousand years ago. In many ways, such as